The last post, on the 10th, was left hanging. The implication was that the celebrations at Bulford were because no big lump of a meteor entered the atmosphere, and therefore there was no airburst or fiery conflagration. In other words, earth had passed the dense phase of the summer Taurids and had entered the long period where the annual meteor shower was simply something happening in the upper atmosphere. More intense that a modern meteor shower but a situation that ceased to be frightening – hence the merriment, games, and feasting. Similar activities are known to have occurred – in the landscape around Avebury, for example, as well as at Durrington Walls, within walking distance of Stonehenge. Bulford is around 3 miles distant – and therefore closer to Durrington Walls. Huge numbers of animal bones were found there – mostly pigs. Were they specially reared for these occasions?
One would think the rising of the midsummer sun, or its midwinter opposite, was nothing for our ancestors to become jubilant about. These things come and go. It is when the sun does not rise in all its splendour that worried our ancestors – and other people around the world. In Japanese myth this is quite implicit. The goddess of the sun was hiding in a cave. What on earth could have caused the sun to become unseen – or be dimmed. Thereby causing cold weather and ruining crops. There is nothing worse than a frost in June or July but sometimes that can happen. Volcanoes can send huge amounts of gases and debris from an eruption into the upper atmosphere that creates a pale sun, or an opaque sun as some people describe the process. It stands to reason that if the earth passed through a very dense stream of material shed by a passing comet that the sun could also be dimmed – possibly even obscured for a while. An airburst could potentially do the same thing. It is thought it was opaque skies that caused the Little Ice Age in Europe and certainly there are references to unusual sky phenomena. These were catalogued in Chinese and Koren annals.
This kind of thinking is taboo in mainstream circles. The excavators of Tall el-Hammam found that the idea of an ancient airburst event disqualified them from being taken seriously, even though their excavation and finds were incredibly detailed and involved, each summer, huge quantities of pottery being shipped back to their university in the US. This will eventually be used to clarify Levantine chronology in general as Hammam was never destroyed or abandoned at the end of the Early Bronze period – unlike most sites in the region. Mind you, they also upset the gay community for suggesting the Biblical tale of Sodom had an origin in a real event. The fact that the gay element may not have emerged until the Greek era rather than at the time of the airburst didn’t seem to matter. The excavators never mentioned sex in any shape or form. It didn’t matter. A superb piece of archaeological investigation was damned as a result of an irrational outcry.
Having digested that we can therefore understand the response of Wessex Archaeology, or rather, that of Matt Leivers, described as a senior research manager. You can find his thoughts at https://www.wessexarch.co.uk/our-work/bulford … he says, in more words than I will type out, that the discovery at Bulford is fundamental because it is the earliest example of people building things that aim directly at the solstice. When we talk about the solstice we are talking about religion. About how prehistoric people understood the cosmos, the world, and their place in it. What we see at Bulford, and later at Stonehenge, is a way of celebrating and marking the passage of time … its likely this was a way of saying to their deities, please keep us in mind, keep us warm and safe. It’s a religious event. And so on.
Actually Neolithic monuments do have alignments that involve the Sun – and the moon. And probably the stars or constellations. Some of them predate Bulford – by a mile. Think of Maltese temples and monuments, and those in France and Iberia. It seems the Skyscape teacher – see https://skyscape.academy … was aware of this. In a published paper Silva mentions the Modego river valley in northern Portugal, and mentions megaliths dating from the 4th millennium BC. Michael Hoskin [2001 and 2002] surveyed some of these passage graves and detected variability in their orientation. He attributed this to difference in sunrise when each of the structures were built. This idea assumes the sun was the focus of interest. Most of them were oriented E to SE and match the positions of sunrise in the winter months of the year. A different approach, he says, is to look not at a single measurement of a supposed axis of symmetry, which is often non existent as these structures do not adhere to such architectural notions, but to look at the range of possible orientations given by the architecture of each structure. This is to say that one can be more confident of finding an alignment if one considers the entirety of the view afforded by the megalithic structures – or the maximum window of visibility. This is rather than accepting any modern western assumptions of where inside this view a celestial object being targeted should be. When this method was deployed a quite different narrative emerged. The visibility was dominated by the mountains of Serra da Estria, in the visibility of all the megalithic sites in the valley [on the Upper Mondego}. Secondly, there is a pattern in the sense that all the maximum windows overlap in the azimuth range 98-111, suggesting that if there was a celestial object being intentionally targeted by all the structures it would have to rise within that tight azimuthal band. Within this band, there are no significant solar or lunar events but the band matches closely the rising of Aldebaran in the constellation of Taurus, one of the brightest stars in the night sky. More importantly, within the phase of megalithic construction in the region. Aldebaran is very bright = the bulls eye. The eye of Taurus the bull. Is that a coincidence?
The Taurid meteor streams are so named as they appear to rise out of the constellation of Taurus. Not of course as far back as the stars but in relatively near space as the meteor streams are within the inner solar system in order to impact annually. They have been left behind by a comet that shed material, or broke up. So, Aldebaran was perhaps one way to focus on that region of the sky, locking in a particular view point. The fact that Hoskin concentrated on solar alignments rather than any others goes back to the mainstream demolition of the Thom’s. All the long alignments to hill top notches and mountains on the horizon were dismissed. Only the solar ones were considered to have significance – and to a certain extent, lunar alignments. The Thom’s did in fact favour solar and lunar alignments themselves and it might be worth, eventually, to reappraise their surveys of the stone circles with the same frame of mind Silva had in mind for the Modego megaliths. However, Thom’s circles were mostly of early Bronze date, which began in the second half of the 3rd millennium BC.
Aubrey Burl, the guy who did the first serious survey of Britain’s megalithic monuments, asks why, in his book, Prehistoric Astronomy and Ritual, Shire:1983, people wanted to orientate a chambered tomb or stone row towards the sun or moon is a question that has never been fully answered. We may never know why prehistoric people did this but we do know what they saw because the movements of these bodies have scarcely changed over the past five thousand years. In other words, going back to the Piorra Oscillation in around 3000BC. In contrast, the position of the stars are very different now from what they were in prehistoric times as a result of precession. He claimed there was little evidence of stellar alignments.
Aubrey Burl was in one respect bemused why there was a preponderance on solar alignments but dismissed the idea that stars were a focii. He did not of course mention constellations, in the round, as an area of the sky that might have been of interest. After all, the Leonid meteor shower rises in the constellation of Leo. It is not necessarily all about the Taurids, which is worth bearing in mind. In contrast, John North in his book, Stonehenge:Neolithic Man and the Cosmos, Harper Collins:1996, repeatedly invokes stellar alignments. His argument is that Stonehenge is remarkable but not unique. We must put it into context, in time and space. In time, it continued a long tradition. In space, it is the landscape surrounding it. The number of prehistoric monuments within 2 km of Stonehenge is to be counted not in tens but in hundreds and the astronomical properties of Stonehenge were heavily dependent on that landscape. There was also the heavens. He says the stones were not erected as a means of investigating the sky in an abstract manner. It was to discover the pattern of behaviour of the sun, the moon, or the stars. Note there is no mention of comets and meteors by either Burl or North as these are transient sky phenomena and therefore not of primary interest. It is thought. Of course, annual meteor streams are not as transient as the passage of a comet, so it is a shame that North did not include them in his surveys. Currently, it is only coherent catastrophists that invoke Proto Encke or Halley, intrigued at how such large intrusive cosmic bodies may have performed in their passages through the solar system when they were much larger in size. Their trajectories are also a matter of interest as it is thought Comet Halley once had an orbit in which it came closer to earth. Neither did Alexander Thom – but he lived long before the 1990s and the discovery of the origin of the Taurid meteor streams. Thom’s focus on lunar alignments, did spark some new ideas in that the moon may play a role in earthquake activity. If it came closer to earth than it does now it may have some influence on tectonics but the actual lunar alignments seem to show the moon was in its present position – and not any closer during its orbit. It is the Silva proposal at Modego that appears to be most promising, finding a stellar parallel that may turn out to be a marker for an annual meteor display. Fred Whipple, in 1940, first pointed a finger at the Taurid complex – a multiplicity of radiants. He tied them all down to a giant comet – Comet Encke being the remnant. He said the meteor streams, or the oldest of them, go back 14,000 years ago. He also said the streams wide spread meant that other planets also encountered them, He had in mind Mars, Venus and Mercury. In 1950 he co authored with S.Hamid and discovered the orbital planes of four meteors in the complex coincided with that of Comet Encke 4700 years ago. The orbits of three meteors coincided with one another but not with Encke – 1500 years ago. Hence, it was not all about Encke. In the 1990s, Victor Clube, an astrophysicist, and Bill Napier, an astronomer at Armagh Observatory, published their first book, The Cosmic Serpent, and later, The Cosmic Winter. They made an orbital analysis of a number of annual meteor showers, tracking their pathways back for thousands of years. Many of them seemed to be interrelated. Not only that but some large cosmic objects such as Encke, Rudnicki, and the asteroids Oljato and Hephaistos were also interrelated. Formerly all part of one larger object. There are in fact some 60 different meteor streams in the Taurid complex, and they all still occur each year. Duncan Steel and Neil Asher, 1998, calculated the size of Proto Encke as 10 km across. Hughes, in 1996, had earlier suggested it was as big as 150 km across. All we need to know is that it was big. Halley’s Comet also has a lot of meteor showers and may have been more active than Encke – in the historical period. It’ nucleus, it has been estimated, has reduced in mass by 80 per cent or more. Not only that it has been calculated that around 1000BC the comet would have had a brightness magnitude of 7.7 as seen from earth. It would have been fifteen times brighter than Venus is now. Nobody would have missed such a bright object in the sky. Halley is famously associated with the eta Aquarids and the Orionids – but it is also connected to at least 15 to 30 other showers. Nicholas Costa equates Halley with the angel Gabriel. He pops up regularly in the Biblical narrative. Likewise, it was an angel of the Lord that destroyed the city of Sodom and its satellite towns and villages at the northern end of the Dead Sea. One to scratch the head.